This Is Your Fault
by Phoenix To Flame
Summary: Whatever Seishirou had been expecting after Rainbow Bridge, it wasn't to be chewed out by an angry sister. But then, she'd always been good at doing the unexpected.


This was supposed to be funnier than it actually turned out to be...but that's what happens when two characters who managed to kill each other over the same guy start talking in the afterlife I guess.

Connects between Turn All The Lonely Years To Days and This Must Be Hell.

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><p>Dying had been an interesting experience, watching the world blurring and fading before his eye, but he wouldn't care to repeat it.<p>

He'd thought that the blackness, when breath escaped him and Subaru's lovely face turned out to be the last thing he'd seen, was the end all, and that as a soul, he would just wait for reincarnation.

But he'd woken, on the streets of an emptied, yet solid Tokyo, where thousands of birds flew overhead, their keening cries the only sound in the twilight. The place where Subaru had stabbed him, leaving a clean hole through his heart, still ached, but in a very detached way. Much like the way this place felt.

Seishirou stood up, feeling none of the numbness that had crept through his body like flower vines lingering, and stared up at the sky, so much clearer than Rainbow Bridge's had been. A single eagle cut through the air, it's odd cry echoing off the empty buildings.

He took one step along the clean road, and watched as flowers suddenly sprang up along an previously vapid earth-filled block.

Another step and weeds poked up through the worn parts where the concrete broke apart, struggling to reach a sun that wasn't there.

A third step and seeing little bits of green color gradually appearing made him aware that it was shifting for him.

Although why it was making _plants_, he wasn't quite certain.

The buffeting sounds of wings smashing against the air came much, much closer, and he looked up to see a flock of sparrows, and a girl with long tumbling golden hair, a long white dress, and enormous wings that beat against the air as she stood at the top of a building.

Seishirou had known her in life, as a girl who sacrificed herself to change a future that she didn't want to see play out.

Which reminded him very much of another girl he'd known, and watched her die a bit more personally.

She glanced down, and froze, wings spread awkwardly to prevent her fall. "You've fallen?" she said at last, something very odd in her voice.

He shrugged carelessly. "If fallen translates to died, then yes."

The birds took flight in a wave of brown feathers, some of them tumbling to earth in a dull reflection of the little bodies they used to inhabit, and she spread her wings again. "Hokuto-san will not be happy about this." she said, and she seemed no longer to be talking to him.

She probably wasn't.

Then the rest of her sentence caught up with him, and he knew that he was definitely going to be in for an adventure.

He'd never met anyone _quite_ as interesting as Hokuto after all.

The girl, who's name he hadn't learned, hopped to the next roof, wings spread wide to catch the air. "She's coming, Sakurazuka Seishirou-san."

It kind of irked him to hear someone other than Subaru using a -san on his name, but there wasn't really anything he could do about it.

Hokuto announced her presence before he was able to see her. "You stupid, stupid, _stupid idiot_!" she yelled, rounding the corner of a street, still the same smallness of 1991, yet seeming to fill the whole air despite it.

She stomped her way over, bright green fabric rippling around her calves as each step seemed to shake the ground. He wasn't _scared_ by any means, but she certainly wasn't in a good mood. "How did you think that _that_ was a good solution to your _thick_-headedness? Did I not _tell_ you that Subaru decided that you were special to him?"

He shrugged as she stopped in front of him, infinitely taller in her annoyance than him. "You meant the persona, the false self." he said with certainty lining his voice. "Not the Sakurazukamori."

Hokuto stomped again, glaring at him as she tugged on the pixie-cut she hadn't seemed to want to lose even in death. "You're _stupider_ than I thought! Neither of them were _you_!" she explained with a wave of her arms that threatened to smack him in the chest. "Subaru loves _you_, without either of your jobs influencing that." She snarled at him, teeth bared like an angry wolf. "I should kick you in the head until you _get_ it." she threatened with the power only she'd been able to assert over him.

It surprised him still that she was able to read him so thoroughly, but it would do no good to show it. "And you know that it stayed this way?" he asked with curiosity.

She crossed her arms in annoyance, ignoring the other girl that glided to the ground, alighting on bare feet. "I can watch him from the mirrors, but that's not the point." she pointed a finger at him, smacking into his chest without care. "The _point_ is, is that you are stupid, and this is all your fault. Now he's going to have to live through the end of the world!" she said with anger coloring her tone loud.

He stepped back from her waving arms, more out of a sense of preservation than any actual annoyance. "So the Dragons of Earth have won?"

To his small surprise, Hokuto didn't answer him immediately, but exchanged a look with Kotori before most of the anger deflated. "No, they haven't. And the World has lost." she looked down. "There's something wrong in the weaving, the wrong people died for this future to come about. And so the World can't continue to renew itself anymore. No more reincarnations, the future is set from this point on."  
>The girl with golden hair stepped up behind her, to hug her softly. Seishirou took a moment to mull over the words. "So Subaru-kun is going to have to live until the world itself ends?"<p>

he asked, coming to the only conclusion that matched up with her words.

She nodded once, sharply. "And if you hadn't made him kill you, then he would have been able to rest in peace." she explained. "He deserved that after everything that happened."

A strange sense of guilt settled over him, like he was the primary instigator of Subaru's suddenly enforced immortality. Which he _was_, but that was beside the point. "So what is this place then?" he asked, not moving in the slightest to emphasize.

Hokuto looked at him more calmly than before, most of the anger faded from her vibrant green eyes. "It's our purgatory, or maybe a paradise. It's where those who changed the direct future so that only this one could come about remain now." She waved a hand at the flowers curling around a block of stone. "As you can see, it changes depending on who's joined, although so far it's only us three."

"The birds are my only piece." the girl said softly from where she still held onto Hokuto. "Like me, small birds. Kotori." There was a faintly unbalanced gleam in her eyes, sparkling like amber.

The dark-haired girl shrugged. "Anyway, although I still want to kick you in the head until you _get_ it that you are _stupid_, it's not going to change anything." she said despondently. "You should probably see where we've chosen to stay, since I don't know if any of the other spaces work right now."

Hokuto turned, dislodging the bird girl from her, and walked off. Seishirou was struck by the strange idea that they were being yin and yang in their coloring and temperaments, even if they didn't quite match the concept. He continued to stand there, watching.

Hokuto noticed that he wasn't following right around the time she reached the corner, and turned back, hands sliding to her hips. "Come _on_ Sei-chan. We may be stuck here for eternity, but I'm not waiting for you. You're still in trouble, so you get to put up with everything I'm doing."

He had the peculiar feeling that exerting his powers of Sakurazukamori would get him nowhere here. Hokuto was as irrepressible and high-spirited as always, even if she was feeling quite homicidal towards him for right now.

He was quiet astonished to find that he had missed her as he did indeed begin to follow, Hokuto pumping a fist into the air in triumph as he caught up with the two of them.

He thought that maybe he could handle it here, for a while at least.

After all, there were worse people to spend an unexpected eternity with than his sort of sister-in-law.

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><p>Cause that's totally what she is to him.<p> 


End file.
